Google Penguin 4.0 Goes Real-Time! Massive Google Fluctuations

Update September 23, 2016: Real Time Penguin is now live! Google just announced on their official Webmaster blog that after a period of development and testing, they are now rolling out an update to the Penguin algorithm in all languages. Aside from the fact that Penguin’s data is now refreshed in real time so that changes will be visible much faster, Penguin is now more granular. The Penguin algorithm will be able to devalue spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting the ranking of the whole site.

Is My Website Affected by the Real Time Penguin?

You might be familiar with the of concept Google Penguin. However, what you might not be familiar with is the concept of Real Time. What this means exactly:

Your site will be penalized in near real-time (if you get unnatural links) as well as recover from a penalty incredibly quickly.(if you disavow or remove the bad links)

If, however, you’re trying to get away with some tactics that are not to Google’s liking, the Penguin will catch up to you really fast and you will not be able to use those tactics for any significant amount of time. Yet, for both recovering and prevention you will need a tool that works fast, accurate and constantly upgraded to the market needs. With Penguin going real-time, the algorithm will now likely get a lot closer to fulfilling its ultimate goal: catch spam link profiles as quickly as possible and keep low-quality sites from ranking well in the search results. Therefore, if you want to stay ahead in the game (or in the SEO game at all), you will need to find a way to constantly and consistently audit your links and perform cleanups where necessary. The cognitiveSEO toolset might be the most reliable partner you can take in your quest of keeping your websites’ high ranks. Here is how the unnatural link detection tool can save your site:

Know how your link profile looks like, as well as your competitors’

Helps you get rid or Disavow your Unnatural links as they appear

Regularly monitors your backlink profile

Alerts you as soon as unnatural link activity is spotted within your website.

Update:A Google employee, Zineb Ait, confirmed on Twitter, today 12th Jan, that this is a Google core update of the algo and it is not Penguin. Gary Illyes also confirmed here. So much simpler where there is communication confusion from Google. Looking forward for the Google Penguin 4.0 to be released.Google Penguin 4.0 ( the real-time update) might have been started! During the last few days a very high SERP volatility was reported by most of the SERP monitoring tools. Lots of tools reported high volatility starting from the 6th of January. The highest spike was reported by Algoroo on the 10th of Jan. People also talk a lot on the SEO related forums about the volatility they see. A first report was done by Dejan on the 10th of Jan:

“Yesterday we reported a significant volatility level in Google’s results but it looks like that was only a warm-up. Today is like nothing we’ve seen in 2015. It’s bigger than Penguin 3. The only event with the greater impact on search results was PayDay Loan update back in May 2014.”

This was not yet officially confirmed by Google but:

Google’s John Mu posted a very fuzzy response on Twitter minutes ago neither confirming nor denying the release of the Google Penguin. This makes me think even more that the update is Google Penguin. Else why would he not confirm that it is not.

First UPDATE 11 Jan After this was posted we got a more straight answer from JohnMu saying that they do not have anything to announce yet. Still does not confirm positively or negatively this. More tools report this high level of volatility in the SERP worldwide.

SERP.watch

Accuranker

MozCast

Also lots of discussions on Webmasterworld during the weekend about the Penguin 4.0 update. The opinions seems to be mixed about Penguin there. Barry Schwartz reported on Seroundtable, on Sunday in a Special Report, about the SERP fluctuations. The real-time Penguin would allow webmasters to recover their sites much faster.At the same time it will penalize spammy link profiles on an ongoing basis. In the last couple of years we, at cognitiveSEO, have learned a lot about unnatural links and penalties by analyzing lots of Penguin penalized sites.

Using the Unnatural Link Detection in the Google Penguin Recovery Tool, cognitiveSEO can help you recover and protect your website from Google Penguin 4.0 or any other link related penalty.

As stated in the beginning this was not officially confirmed by Google. When we have an official answer I will update this post as we get more information from Google’s representatives and from the community. It may be that this is not Penguin, even though it is highly unlikely based on all the reports we see. It could be another Google update.

He is the proud Founder & Chief Architect of cognitiveSEO, an SEO Toolset focused on in-depth analysis of
ranking signals. With over 8 years experience in affiliate marketing and search engine optimization and 12
years in programming and web development, he has gone from Web Developer to Super Affiliate for large
international networks. With a strong focus on everything that is Search Engine related, he developed
strategies to stand-out search engine updates. His passion for search engine marketing led him to create
his own SEO Toolset, trying to solve the issues that he is facing in the search engine optimization field.

Google doesn’t want to say anything, but I think that this may be Google penguin and they don’t want to announce it yet.
We can’t be 100% until we get more feedback from Google, I guess we’ll find out what this is in the near future.

I have been noticing a significant increase over the last week in the UK Serp for some pretty competitive keywords but seeing some strange things also..an example is vastly different results with some keywords appearing on page 2 instead of page 3 but appear on page 3 when I use keyword check tools, perhaps nothing happened at all or perhaps I’m going mad, probably both 😉

you should first check your penalty score/risk and the number of unnatural links. you can do it with cognitiveSEO automatically or you can do it by hand taking each and every link to manual investigation.

once you did this you can do a disavow if you did not already.

in the meantime if you did not do it yet you need to dilute your link profile and create strategies that will bring natural and organic links pointing to your site.

One of our clients seemed to lose traffic, and simultaneously saw higher conversion rates. We are waiting to find out if overall online sales numbers are increasing over the baseline we are looking at, an initial glance shows that appears to be the case. Thought that was interesting food for thought.

Penguin 4.0 is slowly rolling out and its real time that with effect the web pages of site. Each day the page is crawled or index the page get refreshed. Thanks for sharing about Penguin 4.0 update. Hope to get more interesting content from your side to read in future.

Thank you for the post. All of the points in the post is very much useful ones though I have my doubts on disavow links. I think if we can understand the relation between panda,penguin and rankbrain half of our battle is won because I know this for sure that rankbrain has a huge significance when it comes to rankings.

With every new Google Penguin version, spamming sites in abundance have been terminated. Sure there won’t be any other update of Penguin in the future considering the company has shifted it to the core algorithm, it is concerning for every trifling website to protect itself.

We noticed significant drops in some of the sites we tracking but not as they launched the penguin 4.0. Now its live so basically now you make bad links & get the instant punishment.. 🙂 Surely its nightmare for spammers .

Still having troubles with this beautiful Penguin… O.o What happened exactly with the link building rules? If having important backlinks, SERPS change in a bad way, if not doing anything, SERPS change anyway… :/